Hebrews 12:14 “Strive for peace with everyone, and for the holiness without which no one will see the Lord.” Today's episode talks about how we are all called to holiness. In this episode, you will learn two ways to grow in holiness. The episode talks about us being set apart from sin and also developing a relationship with the Lord. Music:"Adding the Sun" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
Strive For Holiness
Hebrews 12:14 “Strive for peace with everyone, and for the holiness without which no one will see the Lord.”
Striving for holiness is something I have been hearing a lot about over the last few years. It is an interesting phrase that I don’t think many people think about. If you were to ask people if they were striving for holiness, I am not sure they would say yes. I don’t think this is because we don’t want holiness. I think it is because we just never really thought about it before. Another reason might be that we have thought about it, and yet we discounted ourselves because we could never be holy. Who are we to think we could be holy?
I remember going to a talk once by Jon Leonetti. He is excellent, by the way. You can find short videos on YouTube where he talks about all things Catholic. You can tell just by listening to him how much he loves his Faith. In his talk, he asked the audience how many people sitting there wanted to go to heaven. We all raised our hands. Then he asked how many of us wanted to be saints. I think there might have been 3 of us that raised our hands out of a couple hundred people in the room. He then said, “You know only saints are in heaven, right?” It’s true. Nothing unclean gets into heaven. This is why we go to purgatory. However, wouldn’t it be better if we started working towards holiness before we died? Wouldn’t it be better not to have to spend as much time getting it right after we die?
This verse tells us that we are ALL called to strive for peace and holiness. It says without this, we will not see the Lord. I don’t know about you, but I want to see the Lord. I want to do whatever I have to do to be able to not only see the Lord but to spend eternity with Him. Holiness is not something we will be perfect at, and I don’t think God expects perfection from us. It doesn’t say in this verse that we must master peace and holiness. It says we should strive for it. So, how do we strive for it?
Let's start with what holiness even means. From what I can gather, holiness means being set apart. Being holy means, we are set apart from the things of this world. It means we are set apart from sin too. One way we could strive for holiness is to ask God for the grace to follow Him in His ways. We can ask the Lord to put on our hearts the various ways we are falling short of holiness and then give us the grace and the strength to change those things. We can take all those things that the Lord put on our hearts to confession, and we can confess our sins and try to sin less next time. Going to confession can help us sin less because it brings our attention to our sins. The more you examine your conscience, the more you will begin to think about it even when you aren’t meaning to. Also, the more aware you will be of what is right and what is wrong. The more you start to look at the Examination of Conscience, the more the Holy Spirit begins to point out things. First, He will point out the big ways we are breaking our relationship with the Lord. However, as we continue to grow closer to Him, we will start to notice even the small ways we offend the Lord. It is gradual and gentle. The Lord is not going to put all the things in your heart at once. He meets us where we are and walks us in slowly.
Another important factor of being holy is having a personal, intimate relationship with our Lord, Jesus, and /or the Holy Spirit. They are three people in one, so it doesn’t matter which you have an intimate relationship with. A lot of people feel more comfortable talking to Jesus as we can relate to Him. He was human. He walked the earth. We have stories about those He hung around. He has a mom and a dad like we do. Others love to talk with the Holy Spirit living inside of us. Some like to talk to God the Father. Any of these are good. Whatever feels the most comfortable for you. You might start talking with one and then as your relationship grows, you might find you are talking to all three depending on the circumstance.
In order to have a personal relationship with any of them, you need to spend time with them. Imagine you wanted to have a relationship with your children, and yet you never had time for them. You wanted to, you meant to, and yet it just never happened. Things kept coming up, and you would get distracted. What kind of relationship do you think you would have with your kids if you never had any time to put into it? Would you know your kids? Would they know you? The same is true with the Lord. If you don’t spend any time with Him, then you won’t know Him. It says in Matthew 7:21-23, “Not everyone who says to me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ will enter the kingdom of heaven, but the one who does the will of my Father who is in heaven. On that day, many will say to me, ‘Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy in your name, cast out demons in your name, and do many mighty works in your name?’ And then will I declare to them, ‘I never knew you; depart from me, you workers of lawlessness.’”
It is not enough to know who Jesus, God, and the Holy Spirit are. It is not enough to read about them in the Bible. It is not enough to admire them or even worship them from afar. We need to spend time with them. We need to talk with them. I know we are all busy, and I know we feel we don’t have any time. Yet, can we really afford not to? Do we really want to risk being one of those who Jesus says, “I do not know you?” We are talking about where we get to spend eternity.
It seems to me the stakes are pretty high, and even if we have tried in the past to have a relationship with Him before and we weren’t able to maintain it, we need to try again. If we ask the Lord to help us, he gladly will. Sometimes not in the ways we would like, but He will always help us. One of my teachers was saying that she had an assignment to spend the day with Jesus, and she thought there was no way she had the time to spend the entire day with Jesus. She went on vacation and got vertigo, and had to spend the whole day in bed. She was on a mission trip with several people, one of whom was a priest. He left the blessed sacrament with her while they went out for the day. She got to spend the whole day with Jesus. Maybe not how she had thought she would, but He made the time for her.
There are other ways to increase holiness. These are just two out of many. Ask the Lord what ways He wants you to grow in holiness, and then sit and listen to what He tells you. It won’t be something so extreme you could never do it. Someone at my prayer group just said yesterday, “God won’t ask you to go to Africa unless he first put Africa in your heart.” He is a loving Father. We don’t have to be scared to go to Him and ask Him what He wants us to do because He knows us better than we know ourselves. He will be gentle with us. He will stretch us and maybe take us out of our comfort zone, but not so much that we need to be scared. Spend time with the Lord each and every day, and He will guide you to holiness. If you feel your schedule is way too busy to add anything else to it, go to my website, walkboldlywithjesus.com, and click on the link to an audio teaching I created titled “Invite Jesus Into Your Every Day.” This will give you ways to talk with Jesus and connect with Jesus without adding anything new to your day.
Dear Heavenly Father, I ask you to bless all those listening to this episode today. Lord, you are amazing, and we love you. We are so sorry that we don’t make time for you. We are sorry we don’t talk with you and cultivate our relationship with you. Lord, please put on each of our hearts at least one way we can grow closer to you. Put on our hearts one way we can grow in holiness. Lord, what we want more than anything in the whole world is to get to spend eternity with you. Please guide us, please show us how. We don’t want to get to the end of this life and have you say, “I never knew you.” We ask all of this in accordance with your will and in Jesus’ holy name, Amen!
Thank you so much for joining me on this journey to walk boldly with Jesus. I want to remind everyone that you just have one more week to sign up for the retreat. CLICK HERE for retreat info. Many people have checked out the webpage with the information and yet have not signed up. I want to encourage you. If you are thinking about it and yet are nervous or scared, sign up anyway. If you have never done a retreat before and don’t know what to expect, listen to Episode 580, Witness Wednesday #78, or you can listen to Episode #577, The Power of Retreats. There really is something very powerful about taking a weekend away and spending it with other faith-filled women. I hope you have been thinking about it or considering it, I pray you will take the leap of faith and sign up. I pray you will do that for yourself. You do so much for others. When was the last time you did something for yourself? I look forward to meeting you here again on Monday. Remember Jesus loves you, and so do I! Have a blessed weekend!